AWS & Oracle Set to Highlight Big MOQ Initiatives at IBC
By Fred Dawson
The tentative toes-in-the-water M&E industry transition to next-gen streaming via MOQ Transport could soon become a stampede considering what Oracle and Amazon will be revealing about their plans at the forthcoming IBC show in Amsterdam.
Executives at Oracle Media Services (OMS) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) tell us they’ve been aggressively pursuing solutions that will allow them to go all-in with end-to-end cloud support for MOQ streaming at both the media and transport layers. The embrace of MOQ-based next-gen streaming by two of the world’s major hyperscalers seems certain to accelerate the emergence of a new norm in video use cases, with tiered latencies as low as sub-500ms and architectural support for immersive and interactive features that are beyond the reach of conventional Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) streaming modes. Continue reading >>>
The implications of Oracle’s strategy are especially meaningful for competitors in the OTT services space considering that, according to company insiders, the MOQ agenda with significant staff expansion and spending is driven from the top by Paramount Skydance chairman and CEO David Ellison and his father Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. The elder Ellison has direct stake in the Skydance gambit as the primary guarantor in its acquisition of Paramount and the currently stalled bid to buy Warner Discovery.
The MOQ strategy is part of an effort to make OCI central to everything Skydance does in the streaming domain, said Ray Gilmartin, senior principal outbound product leader at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). “It’s a big strategic push,” he said.
While this includes use of conventional streaming formats, the Ellisons apparently believe the real-time sub-500ms latencies and feature-rich versatility attainable with MOQ streaming over the sister company’s global Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) could give Paramount Skydance’s services a significant leg up in competition with services relying on conventional streaming.
Which potentially sets up significant demand from Paramount Skydance competitors for similar MOQ streaming support that will soon be available from Amazon Web Services (AWS), which many may find more appealing than risking life out on an Oracle limb. And, of course, there are other global alternatives like the worldwide MOQ reach over the more fully baked Red5 MOQ Transport and media layer platform that’s been running on the CacheFly CDN since the start of the year.
As previously reported, the soon-to-be finalized Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) MOQ Transport standard drew a lot of attention at the NAB Show in April with initial testbed launches and demos anchored by MOQ-adapted CDNs implemented by Cloudflare, the Red5/CacheFly partnership, CDN77, Vindral, and Broadpeak. IBC is sure to expose a lot of new activity on the part of all these players as well as OCI/OMS, AWS and possible newcomers like Akamai, which, despite the prominent role played by Will Law, chief architect for the firm’s cloud technology group, in MOQ standards development, has yet to publicly commit to commercial support for MOQ streaming.
As for AWS and OMS, there will be more to report after the show, but here’s what we know about what’s in store at this point.
AWS
At NAB AWS, which tapped Red5 for a demo running side-by-side comparisons of MOQ, WebRTC, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and low-latency HLS (LL-HLS), declined to discuss any plans relating to MOQ, but, subsequently, Greg Truax, director of live services at AWS Elemental, shared a bit of what’s taking shape while acknowledging he wasn’t at liberty to say much beyond the fact that demand for MOQ support is high enough to persuade AWS it’s worth a lot of the Elemental team’s time.
Truax began by mentioning the fact that Amazon Prime Video “has been doing UDP (User Datagram Protocol)-based streaming at large scales for some time,” which resulted from UDP knowhow acquired with Amazon’s purchase of Net Insight’s Sye unit in 2020. This is tangentially relevant to the MOQ discussion insofar as MOQ relies on UDP streaming through use of QUIC technology, although the Sye use of UDP doesn’t involve QUIC.
But the Amazon Prime experience delivering football, baseball, basketball and other live productions has demonstrated UDP delivers “meaningful QOE (quality-of-experience) improvements” compared to the buffered mode of delivery used in dropped-packet replacement with the dominant Transfer Control Protocol (TCP) mode of distribution, Truax said. “Lower latency is one of the biggest things resulting from less rebuffering,” he added, “but it also enables faster start times.”
User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is a packet transport format that uses datagrams (packets consisting of headers and payloads) to send messages to destinations without the usual complications related to setting up and sustaining intelligent use of connectivity and without reacting to dropped packets. This avoids the latencies introduced by TCP buffering during streaming sessions.
QUIC, invented by Google, adds elements with UDP transport like parallel packet streaming that ensure most packets get through when there’s blockage on one route or another, which comes close to achieving quality levels of TCP-based streaming without the buffering hit on latency. MOQ network intelligence can be used to make instant tradeoffs between latency and quality at three tiers ranging from sub-500ms to five seconds.
“We haven’t launched anything over MOQ yet,” Truax said. “There’s a lot of thought going into this on our side.” That includes discussions with potential partners like Red5 that could expedite getting to where the AWS Elemental team, evidently with high-level backing, wants to go.
“We’re in somewhat of a unique position, because we have all the pieces of the chain except devices,” he said. “So our offering will be more comprehensive. You will see us make a fairly big splash [at IBC].”
According to what we’ve learned from Will Law, the need for MOQ support at the device end is getting a big boost from the Worldwide Web Consortium’s Web Transport Group, which is producing APIs written in JavaScript to enable browser access to MOQ’s QUIC-based Web Transport layer. As a result, the expectation is that MOQ processing will be supported in all the major browsers.
Still, there’s a lot to be accomplished by everyone, including IETF, before MOQ can roll out at commercial scales. At AWS, while tests with potential customers will be getting underway in the near term, “there’s going to be a lot of work on this all the way into December,” Truax said.
Oracle Media Services
OMS is hoping to push things along a little faster, even though the unit has started out on the MOQ quest with less media knowhow than AWS and other providers of MOQ infrastructure. At NAB, one demonstration of MOQ interoperability occurred at several vendor booths with connectivity provided by Cloudflare and Broadpeak CDNs utilizing the new MOQ-optimized Oracle Video @ Edge (OVE) service running on the OCI global cloud compute platform under management of OCM.
OCM’s use of OVE is Oracle’s initial stab at creating architecture aligning ingestion, transport, playback and telemetry into a single fabric, Ray Gilmartin said. Underscoring its new-found focus on media networking, OCI will make a first-time appearance with its own display booth at a major media convention in Amsterdam this month.
“IBC is our coming-out party,” Gilmartin said. “We’ll have a booth and separate meeting room with a lanyard sponsorship that will have 60,000 people wearing our lanyards.”
In our discussion following NAB, Gilmartin noted a big priority was on “creating an end-to-end workflow to move Paramount Skydance over to OCI.” Now it appears that goal may have been met in light of OCI’s recent announcement that it’s integrating the software-defined GMX platform supplied by GlobalM into its global infrastructure.
While the announcement made no mention of MOQ, GlobalM confirmed GMX can be used to support exactly what OMS needs from an OCI-based media network that can spin up and configure resources in a managed workflow supporting compute, processing and routing resources for any given service. Whatever streaming mode is in play, the companies said, GMX nodes automatically implemented across OCI locations will allow contribution feeds to enter the cloud close to their source and exit to receiving broadcasters for CDN connectivity close to their destinations, which will keep the unmanaged first and last miles as short as practical while the core media workflow operates across managed cloud infrastructure.
One of the great advantages MOQ offers to providers looking for real-time streaming solutions is it’s easier to deploy as a ready-to-use option with legacy streaming modes, in contrast to WebRTC-based streaming running over separately dedicated infrastructures. While MOQ isn’t directly compatible with HTTP architecture, basic transport can be implemented with software upgrades to conventional CDNs.
As a result, some MOQ CDN operators like Red5 with CacheFlow and Broadpeak are taking advantage of such capabilities to deliver streaming protocol-agnostic approaches to content distribution. AWS and Oracle appear to be poised to follow suit.
Greg Truax, director, live services, AWS Elemental